Last week, NSW Greens MLC and former abortionist, Amanda Cohn MLC, tabled a bill that would make the state’s abortion laws—already amongst the most extreme in the world—even more radical.
It is no small feat to find a way to extend the NSW abortion laws as Cohn has done, as they already allow abortion up until birth for any reason at all.
Let’s start with what the bill is trying to achieve.
The bill has, as its stated aim, to ensure that abortion is available across NSW within a “reasonable distance” of where people live.
Even if one considers abortion to be health care (it’s not, because health care aims to heal and abortion is about killing), it’s still not clear why it should be a priority above all other forms of “care.”
The lack of health resources and facilities mean that people in the regions must travel for cancer treatments, heart surgery and other forms of life-saving care, so why should abortion be made more available when these are not?
Following on from this, the way in which abortion is to be prioritised is not by requiring the government to provide additional health care resources to the regions, but rather to strip conscience protections away from individuals and institutions already offering much-needed care.
Cohn’s bill would give the NSW Health Minister the power to force public health organisations, including Catholic hospitals, to provide abortion, which would be a significant widening of ministerial power.
Different hospitals provide different services and no one has ever expected that every hospital needs to offer the same thing. Not all hospitals have emergency departments.
Not all have maternity wards. Or paediatric care. People seem to be able to find a health facility that offers what they need without forcing every facility to offer every type of care.
This attack on institutional conscience is even worse than in the state’s euthanasia laws, which do not require Catholic aged care facilities to provide lethal drugs, but—as our Archbishop often says—to allow “kill teams” on site.
The Cohn bill also attacks individual conscience, seeking to force doctors and nurses who conscientiously object to abortion to refer women who want an abortion to someone whose conscience is not troubled by causing the death of the unborn.
This is not only an imposition on the rights of the doctors and nurses, it’s not going to work. No doctor who objects to abortion is going to start performing them because the law says so. They will either disobey or stop providing obstetrics and gynaecological care, which just leaves all women worse off.
This is not the only way that the bill would place women further at risk.
It would allow nurses, and not just doctors, to perform abortions up to 22 weeks’ gestation. Nurses are not trained for this and expanding their remit to allow it could put women at further risk of complications.
The bill would also remove requirements for records to be kept on abortion in NSW. The increased risks posed to women are a somewhat ironic outcome of this bill, with those who claim that abortion restrictions lead to backyard abortions now advocating for them to be performed by less qualified practitioners with no record-keeping.
Interestingly, none of the changes sought by Cohn were recommended in the recent review of the abortion law, which coincided with five years from its passage.
The report confirmed what we already know: abortion does not need any more favourable treatment in NSW. It is already possible up until birth for any reason. It is already protected by exclusion zones that prevent people from even silently praying for an end to abortion within 150 metres of the facilities that provide it.
Indeed, a person can be arrested even for standing outside the 150-metre barrier if someone who is inside can see or hear their objection. These strict perimeters are much larger and encapsulate a much broader range of conduct than the government’s new laws to protect places of worship.
Despite all the posturing about protecting synagogues (and churches and mosques and temples), abortion clinics are still much more protected from protest than churches.
The political reality is that Cohn’s bill will not go anywhere unless it receives support from the government, so the decision of whether this bill gets any airtime is that of the Premier and cabinet.
The question is whether they will have the courage to stand up for women and for people of faith. The answer remains to be seen.